Eminem, Drake lead rap sales surge in 2010

NEW YORK (Billboard) - While there was plenty of dispiriting news in Nielsen SoundScan's year-end numbers for 2010, there were a couple of bright spots: For one, rap music made a big comeback last year, driven by the top-selling album of the year, Eminem's "Recovery," and the non-traditional store sector became the No. 1 retail channel.

While its bump was not huge -- just 3 percent -- rap was the only genre to post an album-sales increase last year, scanning 27.3 million units, up from 26.4 million units in the prior year -- and five straight years of declining sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In 2009, there was a nearly 21 percent drop from 2008's 33.4 million sales, continuing a plunge from 2007's 41.7 million, 2006's 59.5 million and 2005's total scans of 75.1 million. Moreover, in each of those years, the rap decline was larger than the overall U.S. album market's decline.

It's all a far cry from the way that rap began the new millennium: It sold 107 million units in 2000, racking up 13.6 percent of overall U.S. album sales. By contrast, hip-hop finished 2010 with 8.3 percent of all U.S. album sales.

Country also had a solid year, although the genre was down 5 percent to 43.7 million units from 2009's total of 46.1 million units; all other large genres posted declines equal or worse than the overall album market.

For example, Christian/Gospel sales declined 13 percent to 24.2 million units, down from the 27.8 million units the genre garnered in 2009.

Meanwhile, rock, the largest genre tracked by SoundScan (it doesn't track pop as a genre) saw its sales drop 16 percent to 103.7 million units, down from 124.2 million in the prior year.

R&B suffered a similar decline to nearly 57.9 million units, down 17 percent from 70 million. However, SoundScan's R&B totals includes rap sales; excluding those, R&B 30.5 million in 2010 was down a whopping 30 percent from the 43.3 million scanned in 2009.